Up Front

Permeable Boundaries

by Michael Swaine

Something old, something new...

Electronic publishing is permeable publishing.

Old-fashioned print-on-paper publishing wrapped each book or magazine in an impermeable membrane, the cover. Inside the cover, you were in the world of Amazing Stories or Wuthering Heights. Each book or magazine was its own world.

Electronic publishing, potentially at least, embeds a book or magazine in the real world. Or the World Wide Web, which is rapidly coming to mean the same thing, it seems.

An electronic magazine, like this one, can link to articles outside its covers. It can even link to articles in other issues of itself. So, as we do in this issue, we can include an additional two dozen articles that logically fit the theme of an article in this issue. And in doing so, we can present the material in a new context, as we do in “Language Lessons” in this issue.

But I don’t want to give the impression that this issue is all PragPub Remixed.

Zach Dennis is here with some fresh insights on using Mocks. Zach helped write The RSpec Book, so he knows his Mocks.

Jeff Langr and Tim Ottinger have been demonstrating what you might call pair authoring in PragPub recently, and they are back this month with the first part of a two-part exploration of pair programming.

And that’s not all. Dan Wohlbruck flashes back to the first book on programming ever written, Andy Hunt tackles one of the steeper segments of the agile learning curve, and Jonathan Rasmusson devotes his “Way of the Agile Warrior” column to getting you up to speed on velicity.

As for John Shade, well, he has a few things he wants to get off his chest.

Welcome to our permeable little world. Oh, and one more thing: Next issue will be a bit special. We’re going to focus on Clojure, a language that has permeable boundaries itself, with ties to one of the oldest programming languages and some of the most cutting-edge applications.